Saturday, June 17, 2006

Two strikes...

And this time the Comment on Hegerl et al is definitely in the bin. No surprise there, and I did appreciate getting a more reasonably-worded explanation along with the rejection this time. It still seems odd that they say they might be prepared to consider it if and only if we remove any suggestion that it has implications beyond that one specific paper, but they have obviously made their final decision on that point. I'm not going to pursue that approach for the time being - we are off to the UK next week for a workshop on uncertainty in climate change, and I intend to talk about these issues so hopefully we'll get some useful feedback from a wider audience.

Meanwhile, the Comment on Frame et al has been revised and resubmitted, and can be found here. In light of the reply and reviews, we've tried to point out more explicitly where we have significant points of disagreement. We'll probably see how that fares before planning our next move. In the time it's taken, we could probably have got a stand-alone paper done and dusted, but I still think there are good reasons for pursuing it as a Comment and Reply.

I am obviously stupid, I missed out a crucial stage. There is a need to spread out the resulting pdf shape to remove the knowledge gained in the process. Is keeping the shape and just increasing the standard deviation possible or will this introduce a bias into the final shape?

I am basically just aiming for a stable shape. (Myles Allen, How can we (in)validate a probabilistic forecast? Aim for a STAID forecast http://www.climateprediction.net/science/pubs/ecmwf02.pdf) Trying to think about this method (probably with little success), I think it could easily give too much weight to new observations.